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I was talking to a co-worker about Pidgin not coming into focus when there’s a new, inbound IM. The Pidgin window used to come into focus, front and center, when I was running Ubuntu/Gnome and when running OpenSUSE/KDE, but when I upgraded my office desktop to Ubuntu/Unity it stopped behaving this way. My co-worker noticed the same behavior with Fedora17/Gnome. A new IM would come in, but the Pidgin IM window would remain in the background, hidden, unseen and unread.

I thought “There has to be a setting that controls this,” and there is…

Bring up Pidgin’s Buddy List

Click Tools > Plugins

Locate the Message Notification plugin and highlight it

At the bottom of the Plugins window is a Configure Plugin button. Click it

In my case I have 3 monitors on one video card. The card and all three monitors are detected correctly, but after I reboot the “Position” settings have all reverted to what they were when I first installed KDE.

I can change the position settings back to the correct settings, click “Save as Default”, log out, log in, and the position settings have once again reverted to what they were when I first installed KDE.

After trying several things I still haven’t fixed the problem (I suspect a timing issue in the KDE startup) but I did figure out a work-around that anyone can use to “fix” their system so their monitors come up correctly. I posted the work-around on bugs.kde.org and I’m also posting it here.

Here’s how you do it:

Get your monitors set up the way you want them using Configure Desktop > Display and Monitor and click “Save as Default.” This updates the file ~/.kde4/share/config/krandrrc.

Open ~/.kde4/share/config/krandrrc, copy everything on the line after “StartupCommands=”. In my case the line looks like this:

Run the script ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh. Your monitors should still be set up correctly. If they’re messed up, you probably didn’t cut and paste the line correctly. Repeat the above steps again.

Pick Autostart from the KDE menu. (Use the Search function if you can’t figure out where it’s buried.)

Click “Add Script” and paste the line “~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh” into the “Shell script path” text box.

Click OK, click OK.

The next time you restart KDE it will still start up with the wrong configuration, then Autostart will execute ~/bin/workaround-for-kde-bug-312190.sh and fix the problem.

I’ve been using a pre-release “daily build” installation of Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” and noticed that current default for Gnome is for windows to resize themselves when you get close to the edge of the screen. I have two 22″ widescreen monitors and if I moved a window near the top edge it would maximize and fill the screen. If I moved a window to any edge Gnome would decide for me that what I “really” wanted was to enlarge the window to fill half the screen or do something else equally annoying. This might work well on a 10″ netbook screen, but on dual 22″ monitors it’s annoying as hell.

I tracked the problem down to a setting in Compiz, the screen compositing tool used by many Linux desktop environments, so if you’re using KDE or Unity with Compiz and you’re finding self-resizing windows irritating this fix should work for you as well.

To fix the problem you need to install the CompizConfig Settings Manager, so fire up Synaptic Package Manager and search for “compizconfig-settings-manager” and install it.

Once installed, if you’re using Gnome go to Applications > System Tools > Preferences and click “CompizConfig Settings Manager” to start the tool.

Scroll down to “Window Management.”

Uncheck “Place Windows”.

Leave “Grid” checked, but click the word “Grid” to get the Grid settings, then go to the Edges tab and change all Resize Actions to “None”.

Click Back.

Now your desktop will do what you tell it to do, rather than second-guessing you and doing something that you do not want.

One thing that you can now do (that you probably really don’t want) is to have the title bar (and it’s controls) move off-screen, which means you can’t move or resize the window unless you Alt-right-click on it. To fix that issue:

Check the “Put” plugin.

Click the word “Put” to bring up more options, go to the “Misc Options” tab, check “Avoid Offscreen”, click Back, then Close Window.

This problem affects people using the KDE4 desktop with the “Oxygen” style and a recent version of the LibreOffice suite. (I’m running LibreOffice 3.4.2 on OpenSUSE 11.4) The horizontal scrollbar in Calc just doesn’t work, so if your spreadsheet is wider than your screen you can’t use the scollbar to view the right hand side.

The problem is with the Oxygen widget style. On a host running OpenSUSE 11.4 you can change this by going to: